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Last season ended brutally, and unforgettably, with a DEA agent skinned alive and hung on a fence on the border of Mexico; Celia drugged, beaten, and tied to a chair by her neglected daughter in a shack deep below the border; and Nancy exchanging truths and bribes with her Mexican-mayor lover who had a photo of her ratting him out to the FBI under bougainvillea trees. She met that and raised him one with the ultrasound of the baby boy she has brewing in her belly.

This season’s premiere maintains the brutality, with several bloody scenes, and throws in a few heartless exchanges to boot. Nancy’s reproductive abilities may have saved her, for now, from a most uncivilized death at the hands of a royally pissed Mexican mafia, but it has ensured her a most demeaning and perverse near future. “You have no idea, do you?” seethes the mayor, his hand on Nancy’s still-flat belly as she lies in a backless gown in a Twilight Zone sort of medical clinic. “You will lie back, open your legs, and show the doctor I have chosen that in your flat stomach there is a baby that is both male and mine.”

For the first time, we are seeing unequivocally that Nancy just does not get it. She has sold the vicious Mayor Esteban up the river, and yet suggests they make a day out of seeing the Renmar doctor together: “We’ll go together, we’ll get lunch after, how about that?” she coos. Either she’s totally clueless, or she’s more wily than we knew.

Nancy’s utter failings — as a Mom, lover, Andy’s sister-in-law and object-of-desire, and perhaps most significantly, as a dealer — make a theme. She’s the rat, and everyone will know it. She’s pissed off every dealer from Agrestic to Mexico City. What now? “You ruin everything you touch,” shrieks Andy, who has otherwise been reduced to a catatonic, banana-bread–baking babysitter officially in love with (and hating) Nancy.

Nancy isn’t the only one reaping the hostility from her arrogance. Celia, hands cuffed, must allow her her bits to be wiped by her daughter’s maltreated boyfriend, who’s calling around to all of Celia’s loved ones, demanding ransom. But no one cares. “Ah yeah, I’m broke and she’s my ex, so do what you gotta do, okay?” declares Dean, who gets right back to his afternoon card game with Isabelle (looking all grown-up in her rouge and styled hair).

The shit’s raining down on the women of Agrestic and Renmar, and the men around them are dealing with the fallout. Silas’s answer is to plant some crops in the national forest and make a go of it. Uncle Andy is in — his plan to flee to Copenhagen, he is realizing, might not quite deter the Mexican mafia — and Shane is unhappily off to hide out at Nancy’s sister’s in the Oakland Hills (who knew). Nancy is left sipping her iced beverage at the mall alone — albeit surrounded by a dancing (and bizarre) flash mob, with a mafia man on her trail.